I just do iOS development and my opinion is this: Start with XCode then use an LLM to design and develop it out from there its great. The newer models work great with project files where they used to struggle. Using the Visual Code development tools alongside XCode, claude skills and 3rd party libraries and frameworks with SwiftUI and Swift 5/6 is really convincing me I should make apps full time again. Coding apps has become my dream job.
But who will buy it? No knocks against building old projects, but the market will be flooded with extremely speciality projects. I miss when every app had a spec on the box. I think we need something like that for usage. A new modeling language or something.
>the market will be flooded with extremely speciality projects
All the personal tools described in this thread are duct tape and bubblegum under the hood and nowhere near productionizable. That's what Claude Code makes for you.
The whole point is that for personal tools, code quality never really mattered since it's never going to be exposed to the public or be iterated upon by a revolving door team of devs like real software products. These are all highly overfitted tools that shave off like 15 seconds of time in the day for some particular person.
It's almost exactly like having a 3D printer for software, with exactly the kind of quality that a present-day 3D printer gives you.
I really like the 3d printer analogy. You can still make some pretty cool stuff, you can make some pretty complex things if you carefully design the whole system and put in the effort to print each part individually, and quality depends both on how good of a 3d printer you have and on the proper use of it. "3d print me a new house" is still a pipe-dream: you'll get some miniature facsimile of a house, sure, but a proper house requires proper tools and expertise.
Who cares? Nothing wrong with trying to make a product to sell, but projects dont have to be to sell. I've been having a blast lately working on an old game engine I started during covid and getting sidetracked into some new projects. None of them will ever make me a dime but I'm learning a ton and having fun.
Selling would be nice, but a lot of solo builders are mainly in it for the building. The note app I wanted didn't exist anywhere. I was close to hiring a contractor to build it, so it's already worth tens of thousands of dollars to me. I want to make a bit off it but not run a real business. No VC, no employees. If it earns enough to pay my own salary, I get to keep building it as my job, which beats most startup exit math. Reaching maybe 100 people with the same problem is the target.
Honestly, "note app" is a stretch. What I wanted was a knowledge system modeled on PoIC, a Japanese index-card method that predated Evernote. I tried building it on Obsidian and other markdown tools for years and structured notes never stuck for me. I just wanted to talk into my phone and dump quick fragments, then have something extract knowledge and tasks out of them. LLMs and Claude Code closed most of the gap. Now journals, web clips, and daily deep-think sessions all land in it, and Claude Code semi-solves the tasks it pulls out. I'm probably ADHD and it seems to hit for that crowd. Most people would look at it and say "why not Obsidian" lol.
Oleo is C, circa 50k of C code, Neo(-leo) is around 5k of C++ code. A 10th of the size, but not necessarily any less powerful. Oleo has some memory leaks in places, whereas Neo has no (known) leaks.
Oleo uses lex and yacc, whereas Neo has a hand-parser.
Oleo is in the style of emacs bindings, whereas Neo is more vim-like, but without the modality.
I think the Neo code is better-structured and more readable (but I would say that, wouldn't I? - although it is far from perfect). C++ generally makes code more readable and obvious, without all that pointer arithmetic.
The internals of Oleo are more complicated. It uses byte-code for cells, for example. Neo stores a parse tree for a cell. So you can see that a lot of programming effort is saved right there.
In terms of speed, I suspect that the original Oleo is faster, although it's difficult to benchmark.
Neo is also heading towards being a library that you can compile in with other C++ code. Plus there's an interface to Tcl, which Oleo never had. So you get a lot of extensibility there which Oleo doesn't have.
I also think Neo is more generally accessible. It's got something in the way of a menu (still early stages), which helps. Neo is just generally less fiddly with editing cells, IMO. The mouse works, too.
Oleo does have an interface using Motif. Very early-90s. There's even an interface to GTk, although I don't think that works properly. I decided to abandon all that and just stick to an ncurses interface. After all, if you want a fancy interface, there are proper options these days like LibreCalc, Caliigra and Gnumeric.
To add to the cool things you can do with Neoleo, I wrote a little TCL extension that loads current processes into the spreadsheet. I added custom bindings so that you could search for processes, go to its parent, and kill processes.
I'm also half-way to adding a little calendar extension, too.
I'm guessing willingly Maduro surrendered as he took the cash offer from Dec 1, 2025 while publicly rejecting it. After all, he left with his wife.
> “You can save yourself and those closest to you, but you must leave the country now,” Trump reportedly said, offering safe passage for Maduro, his wife and his son “only if he agreed to resign right away”.
Maybe it hit trademark issues, but the reason I remember from slashdot was that phoenix was already a semi-popular open source project in the debian repository, so firefox had to be named from phoenix to mozilla-phoenix. But firefox at the time still named phoenix just ran so much better on windows than linux, it was funny.
Phoenix Technologies, the BIOS maker sent me an email telling us they made a BIOS web browser and our name would confuse things. Under advice from our legal support, we agreed to change the name.
We changed to Firebird and the OSS database project bombed my inbox (and Mitchell's too) for a week with hundreds of nastygrams and though we were in the clear on TM, we didn't want to stomp on the little OSS project so we changed again.
I was at the whiteboard when Jason Kersey of mozBin, mozillaZine, and later Chrome fame came up with Firefox. We had two columns of names, forces of nature and animals and were pairing them up.
I thought Phoenix may have just made that up because they were miffed about someone in tech using their name, but no, they actually did have a "BIOS web browser"!
> We had two columns of names, forces of nature and animals and were pairing them up.
Nice. Now I wonder if the ~0.8? era extension "Firesomething" was directly inspired by that whiteboard. IIRC it randomly combined two components from lists.
Ah neat, I didn't realize it was the bios maker that was behind that one, I thought it was the IBPhoenix product, it's been way too long since all that happened and I think it's all gotten jumbled in my memory.
Phoenix was because of a challenge from Phoenix Technologies, the BIOS maker. Firefox was because of concerns about stomping on a small OSS project, the Firebird Database. I was responsible for all of this at Mozilla. Happy to answer any questions.
Thanks for clarifying! FWIW, I wasn't there, but that matches exactly what I remember from that time (I did follow all the different renamings in detail).
I have Objective-C software for iOS that was built for iOS 3 that still runs on the latest version of iOS and people still pay for it. Strange how language stability is an achievable goal.
https://github.com/LeoMobileDeveloper/ios-developer-tools
https://github.com/AvdLee/SwiftUI-Agent-Skill